SARGENT AND FASHION at the TATE BRITAIN on the 26th, MAY 2024

 

SARGENT AND FASHION at the TATE BRITAIN on the 26^th, MAY 2024

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautraeu) by John Singer Sargent 1883-4

The emphasis of Tate Britain’s Sargent and Fashion exhibition is fashion, what’s in vogue, and, by implication, what’s not.  Not only fashion is on view here, but also the fashionable, not just what they wear but how they wear it.

Mrs Hugh Hammersley, oil on canvas, 1892

Sargent lived in the era of haute couture, meaning high end fashion reserved for the very wealthy and implying sewing and dress making.  By the end of Sargent’s life, haute couture was giving way to pret a porter, meaning fashion ready to wear and for a much wider public.

Lady Sassoon by John Singer Sargent, 1907

The exhibition talks firstly about Sargent’s use of black, for example his work Madame X (1883-4).  Black, traditionally reserved for mourning was beginning to break out of this confine and be used in a variety of new contexts.  Sargent idealised those heroes like Diego Valazquez and Frans Hals both masters of black and was unable to paint when visiting his friend Claude Monet who did not have any black paint.

Ena and Betty, daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer, oil on canvas, 1901

Sargent often re-arranged costumes for effect and had an intimate understanding of materials like velvet and silk and their painterly qualities.  His portraits are now much more famous than his sitters, who have mostly fallen out of memory.

Dr Pozzi at Home, oil on canvas, 1881

An American born in Florence, Italy, Sargent became one of the most illustrious society portrait painters of his day.  He initially settled in Paris but the scandal surrounding his portrait Madame X forced him to move to London where he took over studios in 33 Tite Street, previously occupied by another American artist, James McNeill Whistler.  Today it is hard to understand the public's reaction to Madame X and their declarations 'detestable, ennuyeux, cureiux, monstreux' (hateful, boring, curious, monstrous).  Oscar Wilde was a neighbour, and the American novelist Henry James became a friend, yet another expatriate making it in the Old World.  Sargent’s style is triumphantly realist and conventional at a time when art was beginning to diverge between those practising a realist aesthetic and experimenters. 

Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer (A Lady in White), oil on canvas, 1889-90

Sargent's work is bold, uncompromising and obvious, qualities that met the needs of his patrons who were also often involved in some ways with the visual arts.  Clients understood the clothes that they wanted to wear and the effect they had on society, but they also understood the painterly qualities of fabrics, how easy or how complicated it was to paint them.  They communicated a great deal of this to the artist although Sargent himself was rather tight lipped about the rapport between artist and sitter.

La Carmencita, oil on canvas, 1890

Sargent's reputation has latterly declined, possibly because he is out of step with modernity and the whirlwind of radical art movements that followed The Gilded Age, the period of economic expansion from the 1870s to the 1890s.  Interestingly, although it hardly seems correct, Sargent's declining profile has been correlated with the rise of antisemitism.  Some of Sargent's clients were Jewish and this can be discerned most clearly in the work Almina, Daughter of Asher and Flora Wertheimer (1908).  Europeans often wore Oriental fashions in the Victorian era without understanding in any profound way the implications or cultural associations of the dress for the peoples concerned.  In this painting Almina is wearing Turkish dress, plucking a middle-eastern stringed instrument but Almina was an Ashkenazi Jew.  The image sends Almina back to the context from which she emerged.  The association of finance capital with art is very old, in fact it goes back to Rembrandt and beyond, probably because art tends to retain its value and is therefore seen as a good investment.  However, it is hard to see how more experimental trends in European art can be connected to antisemitism.  Sargent's bold, expressive work simply became dated and conventional and not because he painted Jewish families, but it is still impressive, exceptional and compelling.

Costume worn by La Carmencita, c.1890

The exhibition has little to say about Sargent's life because the thematic insistence is on fashion, even though Sargent's paintings are now rather unfashionable.  The exhibition is really about the fashion of a lost era, perhaps not enough is done to contextualise Sargent.  Sargent is depicted as lost in blue and cream swirls of colour, diaphanous, vague and trite, yet there is a lot more in the faces of his sitters than this.  They clearly comment, or want to comment, speak out directly as if to the camera, and tell the viewer the truth about Sargent, fashion, their epoch, in other words, the human being behind the paint has somehow emerged.

Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, 27th May 2024

Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d'Abernon, oil on canvas, 1904